This invention relates to the field of cinema presentation and more particularly to a method and system for reducing motion artifacts.
The appearance of moving images, such as those obtained by a panning camera in filming a video presentation or motion picture, may be undesirably blemished by motion artifacts. For example, motion pictures include a series of image frames that are typically shown to viewers at a frame rate of 24 frames per second (fps). The human eye can typically perceive undesirable temporal aliasing effects between image frames that contain objects that are moving rapidly across a field of view in the image plane.
Conventional approaches to this problem usually require a cinematographer to defocus or blur the image. This may reduce the juddered appearance of the object in motion. However, this blurring may undesirably limit the cinematographer""s artistic autonomy in capturing the creative elements of the scene. Also, this blurring may not reduce the juddered appearance to sufficiently please the human eye.
In addition, conventional approaches do not resolve the persistence problems typically associated with human vision. For example, flicker effects perceived by the human eye worsen as the brightness of a motion picture is increased. In order to reduce or overcome these flicker effects, the cinematographer must reduce the brightness of particularly bright scenes or a scene viewed with a particularly high ambient light level. These constraints may also undesirably limit the cinematographer""s artistic autonomy.
Other approaches have included increasing the temporal frame rate of the image capture process. However, this approach undesirably requires increased storage, distribution, and production resources that exceed those used in existing systems. Furthermore, this approach requires that existing equipment be modified to be effective. Therefore, it is desirable to diminish the flicker effects of frame objects.
From the foregoing, it may be appreciated that a need has arisen to eliminate undesirable temporal aliasing effects caused by objects moving rapidly across a field of view in the image plane. In accordance with the present invention, a motion artifact reduction system and method are provided that substantially eliminate or reduce disadvantages and problems of conventional systems.
According to one embodiment of the invention, there is provided a method and system for reducing motion artifacts having a series of cinematic feature image frames captured at an incoming frame rate. The motion artifact reduction system also has a processor operable to determine whether an object having a first location in a first image frame is sufficiently displaced from a location in a second image frame corresponding to the first location. The processor is also operable to interpolate data from the first image frame and the second image frame to create a third image frame including the interpolated data. The processor is also operable to insert the third image frame between the first image frame and the second image frame to form a new series in response to the determination that the object has been sufficiently displaced between image frames.
One technical advantage of the present invention is that it may be used in a variety of points along the authoring and presentation process. For example, the present invention may be used during the authoring process to correct imperfections. Yet another technical advantage of the present invention is that it may be used with other image enhancement processing such as noise reduction techniques.
Another technical advantage of the present invention is that it may reduce the production resources required to provide image artists additional enhancement controls in developing the content they desire. Yet another technical advantage of the present invention is that it may be used without modification to existing production and/or authoring equipment. Another technical advantage of the present invention is that it may be used in existing presentation systems with little or no modification. For example, the present invention may be used by a projector based on ancillary information that may be stored or distributed with the motion picture data. Other technical advantages may be readily ascertainable by those skilled in the art from the following figures, description, and claims.